Imaginaries
by
Ken Junior Lipenga
April 2014
Dissertation presented for the degree ofDoctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at
Stellenbosch University
Supervisor: Dr. Grace A. Musila Co-supervisor: Prof. Annie Gagiano
i Declaration
By submitting this thesis electronically, I declare that the entirety of the work contained therein is my own, original work, that I am the sole author thereof (save to the extent explicitly otherwise stated), that reproduction and publication thereof by Stellenbosch University will not infringe any third party rights and that I have not previously in its entirety or in part submitted it for obtaining any qualification.
April 2014
Copyright © 2014 Stellenbosch University
ii Abstract
This thesis examines depictions of disability in selected African films, novels and memoirs. Central to the thesis is the concept of narrative enablement, which is discussed as a property that texts have for enabling the recognition of disability by the reader or viewer. In the thesis, I investigate the ways in which narrative enablement manifests in the texts.
The motivation for the study comes from the recognition of several trends in current literary disability studies. Firstly, the study attempts to expand the theoretical base of current literary disability studies, which consists of ideas formed from a narrow epistemic archive. Similarly, the study also recognises that scholarship in the field mostly relies on a limited canon of texts, almost wholly drawn from the Western world. This study therefore allows a glimpse at an under-acknowledged archive of disability representation, which is then used to suggest the possibility of alternative ways of understanding disablement on the African continent and globally.
The first chapter is meant as an entry point into some of the complex lives depicted in the thesis. In this chapter, I explore the intersection that the texts draw between disability and masculinity, illustrating the way this intersection evokes questions about how we understand the relationship between the two concepts. In the second chapter, I examine the way socio-political violence on the continent is represented as a cause of both disablement and disenablement. This chapter is an exploration of how disability is enmeshed with other social realities in people’s lives. The term disenablement is employed in order to capture the presentation of disablement amidst various forms of violent oppression. As it is portrayed in the majority of the texts studied in the thesis, disablement is a factor of social attitudes. My third chapter examines how these texts create dis/ability zones, areas where the reader/viewer witnesses the fluidity of socially constructed disablement in particular societies. As it is portrayed in the texts, and discussed in the thesis, this zone is a space where disabled characters encounter the ableist world. It is a space that allows the destabilization of entrenched notions about disability, and consequent recognition of disabled characters. The most explicit manifestation of narrative enablement occurs through creative intervention, which is the focus in the fourth chapter. In this chapter, I examine the role of various forms of creativity as they are enacted by the characters, arguing that they are manifestations of the characters making use of narrative enablement. In the texts, the disabled characters use
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unique modes of storytelling – not exclusively verbal – to narrate their story, but also to assert their belonging to particular familial, cultural, as well as national worlds.
iv Opsomming
Hierdie tesis ondersoek uitbeeldings van gestremdheid in geselekteerde films, romans en memoirs uit Afrika. Die konsep van narratiewe bemagtiging – ‘n konsep wat ondersoek word as ‘n kapasiteit van tekste wat die erkenning van gestremdheid bemoontlik vir die leser of kyker – staan sentraal in hierdie studie. In my tesis ondersoek ek die maniere waarop narratiewe bemagtiging in die tekste manifesteer.
Die beweegrede vir hierdie studie kom uit die realisering van verskeie strominge in kontemporêre letterkundige gestremdheidstudies. In die eerste plek onderneem hierdie studie die taak om die teoretiese basis van huidige literêre gestremdheidstudies, wat bestaan uit idees wat op hul beurt uit ‘n enge epistemiese argief gevorm is, uit te brei. Op soortgelyke wyse erken die studie dat akademiese navorsing binne hierdie studieveld meestal berus op ‘n relatief klein kanon van tekste, feitlik geheel-en-al uit die Westerse wêreld. Hierdie studie bied dus ‘n kyk op ‘n onder-erkende argief van gestremdheidsvoorstellings, wat op sy beurt gebruik word om die moontlikheid van alternatiewe maniere waarop gestremdheid binne Afrika asook wêreldwyd begryp kan word, aan te toon.
Die doel van die eerste hoofstuk is om ‘n intreepunt te skep waardeur sommige van die komplekse ervaringswêrelde wat in die tesis ondersoek word, betree kan word. In hierdie hoofstuk ondersoek ek die oorvleuelings tussen gestremdheid en manlikheid wat deur die tekste uitgebeeld word, om sodoende aan te toon dat hierdie oorvleueling vrae oproep in verband met hoe ons die verhouding tussen hierdie twee konsepte kan verstaan. In my tweede hoofstuk ondersoek ek die manier waarop sosio-politieke geweld op die kontinent uitgebeeld word as ‘n oorsaak van gestremdheid sowel as van ontmagtiging. Hierdie hoofstuk ondersoek die wyses waarop gestremdheid verwikkeld is met ander sosiale werklikhede in mense se lewens. Die term disenablement [hier: ‘ontmagtiging’] word gebruik om die uitbeelding van gestremdheid midde-in verskillende vorme van gewelddadige onderdrukking vas te vang. Soos uitgebeeld in die meeste van die tekste wat in die studie ondersoek word, is gestremdheid ‘n aspek van sosiale houdinge. My derde hoofstuk ondersoek hoe die gekose tekste areas van be/ontmagtiging skep; gebiede waar die leser/kyker die vloeibaarheid van sosiaal-gekonstrueerde ontmagtiging in spesifieke gemeenskappe waarneem. Soos uitgebeeld in die tekste en soos wat die studie die saak bespreek, is hierdie zone ‘n gebied waarbinne gestremde persone die bemagtigde wêreld ervaar. Dit is ‘n area waarbinne die versteuring van vasgelegde konsepte van gestremdheid, en gevolglike erkenning van gestremde persone, kan
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plaasvind. Die mees eksplisiete ontplooiïng van narratiewe bemagtiging gebeur deur middel van skeppende intervensies, wat die fokus vorm van my vierde hoofstuk. In hierdie hoostuk ondersoek ek die rol wat gespeel word deur verskillende vorme van kreatiwiteit soos beoefen deur die karakters, in die loop van my argument dat hiedie skeppingsvorme voorbeeelde is van hoe narratiewe bemagtiging plaasvind. In die tekste gebruik die gestremde karakters unieke metodes van vertelling – nie uitsluitlik verbaal nie – om hulle verhale te vertel, maar ook om aan te toon dat en hoe hulle aan partikuliere familiale, kulturele en nasionale wêrelde behoort.
vi Acknowledgements
I owe the success of this project to number of individuals and organisations.
I would first of all like to convey my thanks to my supervisors, Dr. Grace A. Musila and Prof. Annie Gagiano for their guidance and encouragement throughout the entire process of writing this thesis.
I also owe a debt of gratitude to Prof. Leslie Swartz, for the interest he has maintained in my project from the start, and for introducing me to some valuable academic networks.
Thanks are also due to Dr. Timwa Lipenga, for giving me feedback on my chapter drafts, and above all, reassuring me that the project was a possibility.
I would also like to take this moment to express my appreciation to various colleagues in the scholarship programme for their comradeship which lowered the loneliness that inevitably accompanies a PhD project. To Michael Coombes and Gibson Ncube, thanks for the lunchtime company and steady stream of ‘interesting’ humour that accompanied our meetings. More thanks to the conversations shared with colleagues in the department: Kaigai, Phillip, John and others.
To my wife, Funny, thank you for your understanding during my many moments of inexplicable stress and erratic behaviour.
The English Department at Stellenbosch University has also been a crucial contributor to the development of this project, through various intellectually stimulating seminars, workshops, and discussion groups.
I hereby acknowledge the funding that was awarded to me by the Graduate School of Arts and Social Sciences to pursue my doctoral studies full-time at Stellenbosch University.
* * *
A shorter version of Chapter 1 is due to appear in the African Journal of Disability 3.1 (2014) under the title “Disability and masculinity in South African autosomatography”.
vii Table of Contents Declaration... i Abstract ... ii Opsomming ... iv Acknowledgements ... vi
Introduction: Enabling New Conversations on Disability ... 1
Introduction ... 1
Narrative enablement ... 6
The genres of enablement ... 8
Theoretical points of departure ... 12
Defining disability in the African context ... 15
Description of chapters... 18
Chapter 1: Narrating the Experiential: Living With/in Disability ... 21
Introduction ... 21
Life, linocuts and love: Spring Will Come ... 25
A scrapbook of masculinity: The Language of Me ... 30
Expanding the blueprint of masculinity: Lyrics Alley ... 36
Fathers and sons: Performing Masculinity in Able-Bodied ... 43
‘Useless’ bodies and ‘kings of women’: Measuring Time ... 53
Conclusion ... 60
Chapter 2: Violence: Contextualising Disabilities and Exploring Spaces of Dis/Enablement ... 62
Introduction ... 62
Colonial contexts of disablement: Camp de Thiaroye ... 65
Apartheid and intra-police violence: Deafening Silence ... 76
Torture, trauma and pain: Beneath the Lion’s Gaze... 82
Living scars of innocence: Moses, Citizen & Me ... 93
Conclusion ... 101
Chapter 3: Tracking the Social – the Power of the Normate? ... 103
Introduction ... 103
Interrogating ‘abilities’: Xala ... 106
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Imagining spaces of homecoming: Moses, Citizen & Me ... 128
Conclusion ... 139
Chapter 4: Enabling Disability: Disability as a Socially Adaptive and Creative Condition ... 140
Introduction ... 140
Art as metadiegesis in Spring Will Come ... 142
‘The Pencil Revolution’: art and verse in The Language of Me ... 148
Voicing presence through song: Lyrics Alley ... 153
A tapestry of hope: Zulu Love Letter ... 160
Shakespeare as therapy: staging the narrative of healing in Moses, Citizen & Me ... 167
Re-storying history through narrative in Measuring Time ... 174
Conclusion ... 179
Conclusion: towards a novel epistemology of disability ... 180
1
Introduction: Enabling New Conversations on Disability
“The crippled veteran of the Pacific war says to my brother, ‘Resign yourself to your colour the way I got used to my stump; we’re both victims’. Nevertheless with all my strength I refuse to accept the amputation.” (Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks 107-108)
Introduction
Frantz Fanon is not as common a presence in disability studies as he is in postcolonial studies. Nevertheless, his words are evoked here as a way of situating this study at a particular crossroads. Fanon’s citation (above) from the film Home of the Brave is an illustration of a demand for recognition. The refusal to “accept the amputation” or “to adopt the humility of the cripple” (Fanon, Black Skin 107) is a refusal of any attempt to demarcate one’s identity, to accept definition on the basis of one’s colour or one’s disability alone. The images evoked by Fanon’s words are important as a way of introducing the focus of this thesis. For me, the statement captures not denial of the impairment of the body, but more importantly, the refusal of any lessening of one’s human stature or dignity on the basis of a ‘different’ appearance. But first, a small tale from the Internet.
There was a small furore of activity recently on one of the many online academic forums for discussing disability. This was in reaction to an article which had appeared on the website of
The Guardian, listing “The top 10 books about disability”.1 Predictably, the list consisted of Western classics that anybody in the field of disability studies is familiar with, among them Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. The reaction to the list was just as predictable, although not on the grounds I had expected. Commentators were disappointed that the majority of titles listed were authored by non-disabled persons and could therefore not truly be representative experiences of disability. My own reaction, on the other hand, was one of muted shock that a person would call his list “The top 10 books about disability” without realizing that all of these texts were penned by white authors and featured, almost exclusively, white disabled characters.
This list is representative of an attitude that has long existed in literary studies – the failure to give adequate recognition to and fully to acknowledge the worth of non-Western (particularly
2
African) literature. This absence is often defended by claims that the producers of such literature do not do enough to disseminate their works to the rest of the world.
Fanon’s speaker above points out that he refuses to accept the observer’s amputation of his or her being. In a way, this thesis re-enacts this refusal. It is my personal voice against assumptions that there are no worthwhile literary representations of disability outside the Western World. This study seeks to fill this glaring gap in its examination of African creative imaginaries through the lens of disability studies, investigating what these imaginative representations contribute to understandings of disability.
The value accorded to these texts stems from the recognition that, as renowned disability studies theorist Rosemarie Garland-Thomson points out, “narratives do cultural work [and] frame our understandings of raw unorganised experience, giving it coherent meaning and making it accessible to us through story” ("Shape Structures Story" 122). The chosen stories draw the reader/viewer into the authors’ and characters’ world, enabling imaginative access to experiences, locations and types of disability within broader and hitherto under- or unrecognized parameters. The scope of these various African narratives is broad, since (as María Pía Lara argues):
[a]s agents of cultural contact, narratives work across the boundaries of their own culture, as well as of those cultures that incorporate them. They engage public opinion in a continual process of dissolving, reshaping, expanding or transgressing boundaries that have been drawn at various levels of cultural socialization. (Moral Textures 152)
Lara usefully draws attention to the capacity of narratives to affect thought within their own cultures as well as outside them. With this in mind, I chose to use the selected texts to illustrate the way in which narratives about disability from Africa have the potential to destabilise some entrenched assumptions concerning disability and to provide alternative ways of conceiving this range of phenomena.
To rephrase Fanon, therefore, this thesis is part of a refusal of the amputation of non-Western literature from the discourse of disability studies. A selection of eleven texts has been marshalled to speak out against this silence regarding representations of disability in the non-Western – specifically, the African – context. The selection was influenced by a consideration of the variety afforded by differences in geographical location (within the African continent) and genre, which permits an examination of the representation of disability in different narrative modes. The study examines depictions of disability in these
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texts, focusing on characterisation, style, and socio-cultural contexts. This approach allows for an investigation of how the creative works demonstrate and perform what I term textual and contextual enablement of the disabled body within particular social environments.
The texts are from a range of contexts, which can themselves be seen as disenabling.2 For example, John Miles’s novel Deafening Silence (1997) and Ramadan Suleman’s film Zulu
Love Letter (2004), while both primarily focusing on deafness, also centre on apartheid
discrimination against blacks in South Africa. Ousmane Sembène’s Camp de Thiaroye (1987) also highlights racist discrimination, but this time in colonial Senegal. Maaza Mengiste’s
Beneath the Lion’s Gaze (2010), Helon Habila’s Measuring Time (2007) and Delia
Jarrett-Macauley’s Moses, Citizen & Me (2005) are novels that highlight the disabling effects of war on individuals and society, as well as the ubiquity of armed conflict in many parts of the continent. Selected texts further include Sembène’s classic film, Xala (1975), as well as its novel version (1976) and Lyrics Alley (2010), a novel by Sudanese author Leila Aboulela, which depicts the life-changing experiences of a young man disabled through a diving accident. Texts from the life writing genre included here are Leslie Swartz’s Able-Bodied (2010), Musa E. Zulu’s The Language of Me (2004) and William N. Zulu’s Spring Will Come (2005).
Altogether, the chosen texts depict different levels and forms of incapacity in diverse African settings and highlight the significance of context in definitions and negotiations of disability; while offering opportunities for commentary on the experiential and metaphoric depictions of disability across the genres (fiction and non-fiction) and media (literature and film), as well as examples of individual and social (re-)adjustment. Though Sembène’s Xala (both film and novel) and Camp de Thiaroye are older texts, they occupy a special position in the African literary and cinematographic canon, being among the earliest African texts to bring disability into focus. Despite this, the texts have not been analysed through the lens of disability studies. Including them in this study is an acknowledgement of their inauguration of disability as a focal issue in more recent African writing and film.
2 Patriarchal societies are an example of such disenabling societies, where being female and disabled
can create an extra tier of marginalisation. In a way, this also stands as a form of disenablement partially responsible for the dearth of the female voice in authorship. This is also reflected in the unfortunate gender imbalance in the representation of disability in the African creative imagination, both at the level of authorship (few female authors/directors dwell on the subject of disability) as well as characterisation (most disabled characters are male).
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This is by no means a complete list of African creative texts that depict disablement. Representations of disability start from the vast wealth of oral literature that exists on the continent, with examples ranging from the Yoruba deity Obatala’s role as the creator of disability to oral historical records of Sundiata Keita of Mali. For the present exercise, however, the focus is on more contemporary texts in written form and film, recognising the way such texts contain influences of this folklore background. A number of texts have been omitted from the study, including Oscar Pistorius’s Blade Runner (2009); Natalie du Toit’s biography, Tumble Turn (2006) (by Tracey Hawthorne); Chenjerai Hove’s Ancestors (1996); Jane Kaberuka’s Has God Forgotten Me? The Cry of an Accident Victim (2002); and Esther Owuor’s My Life as a Paraplegic (1995). The first two, though detailing the experiences of disabled characters, focus almost exclusively on their sporting careers and less on other aspects of their lives. The role of Miriro, the deaf and mute female character in Hove’s novel, is too tightly interwoven with other characters to fit into the current analysis and her (posthumous) voice does not feature extensively in this text. Similarly, Kaberuka and Owuor’s texts are also excluded since they hardly present details of the narrators’ lives separate from their hospitalization and religious faith. Also left out is Kobus Moolman’s
Tilling the Hard Soil (2010), a collection of short stories, poems, and extracts from longer
works by disabled writers from South Africa. The careful selection of texts also necessitated the omission, on grounds of relevance and centrality of the disabled character, of other films for analysis in the dissertation than those discussed here – including Gaston Kabore’s Wend
Kuuni (1985); Djibril Diop Mambéty’s La Petite Vendeuse de Soleil (1998); Ousmane
Sembène’s Guelwaar (1993) and Saadi Jilaani’s Khorma (la betise) (2002). However, I believe the selection of texts analysed in this thesis contains a representative selection of presently available material for my discussion, in the sense that they are apt illustrations of narrative enablement. The material helpfully indicates possible ways of looking at certain aspects of African history anew, with a focus on the role of the disabled body in representation. These texts therefore facilitate a fresh look at familiar topics such as colonial violence and racism. Most importantly, they illustrate how the representation of disability in literary imaginaries can be read as forms of narrative enablement, a term I explain presently.
This study is situated in the tradition of some recent scholarship on disablement in African imaginative writing. Considering such writing is a departure from the trend of focusing only on Western-produced texts, a tendency which, as illustrated below, has also led to the burgeoning of Western-produced theories and assumptions about disability and its
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representation. As a result, it is not unusual for scholars simply to uncritically apply the theories of Western origin to the developing world, a practice that has been challenged by a number of scholars. For instance, Clare Barker and Stuart Murray criticise the manner in which “Disability Studies problematically transports theories and methodologies developed within the Western academy to other global locations, paying only nominal attention to local formations and understandings of disability” (19). Similarly, Helen Meekosha observes that “[t]here has been a one-way transfer of ideas and knowledge from the North to the South in [disability studies]” (668). One of the main faults with existing theory in the field is “the neglect of racial thinking [which] results in a problematic universalizing tendency that fails to account for differences in treatment across racial communities” (Snyder and Mitchell 111). Noticing this neglect has led to a more focused examination of intersections between disability studies and postcolonial studies. This is the kind of work that Pushpa Naidu Parekh (2007) and Anita Ghai (2012) are engaged in. Parekh focuses on Indian postcolonial cultural works as presenting crossover points for disability and postcolonial concerns. Similarly, Ghai’s work is a remarkable attempt to employ postcolonial scholarship as a way of enriching disability studies, applying the resulting hybrid approach to a reading of disabled characters in Indian film. In “(Post)colonising Disability” (2007), Mark Sherry sounds an important warning to scholars to be wary of “the rhetorical connection commonly made between various elements of [conventional or dominant postcolonial studies] (colonization, exile, diaspora, apartheid, slavery, and so on) and experiences of disability” (10), because addressing the lives of disabled characters in African contexts requires greater recognition of the circumstances of the postcolonial present than of the colonial past. For Shaun Grech, the predominantly Western-oriented nature of disability studies makes it “complicit in the neocolonising of the Southern space” ("Majority World" 52). The work of these scholars aids in expanding entrenched (Western) notions of disability, and illustrates the unique nature of disability in the developing world.
Besides numerous articles examining intersections between the fields of literature and disability studies, there are a few lengthier projects that provide valuable insights into this intersection. Of particular note is Ato Quayson’s Aesthetic Nervousness (2007), which attempts to rope postcolonial fiction to disability studies while simultaneously proposing a theory of disability representation. However, as Clare Barker and Stuart Murray rightly observe, Quayson’s book falls a bit short of being representative of such an intersection, since it does not explore “the questions of how postcolonial cultures per se represent” (225), and
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one might add, contribute to, contemporary debates on disability. Julie Nack Ngue’s Critical
Conditions: Refiguring Bodies of Illness and Disability in Francophone African and Caribbean Women’s Writing (2007) is one example of a work that does highlight cultural
contributions to notions of disability. Ngue examines the way particular narratives challenge dominant Western formulations of normative health and normalcy. Taking a similar approach is Clare Barker’s Postcolonial Fiction and Disability: Exceptional Children, Metaphor and
Materiality (2011), which examines the depiction of disablement among children in the
postcolonial world.
There are various reasons for this pursuit, ranging from the recognition of the dearth of studies of disability as depicted in the literature of the postcolonial world to the need to revoke the assumed universality of Western produced epistemologies of disability. 3 My hope is that the current study can make a contribution to this bustling exercise, which attempts to enlarge and add colour to the largely monochromatic field of literary disability studies. In other words, postcolonial spaces provide the opportunity to further open up what Chris Bell (2006) sees as “white” disability studies.
Narrative enablement
I began this introduction by calling the study a rejection of the amputation of African texts from literary disability studies. The more ambitious aim of the study, however, is to showcase these texts as works of narrative enablement, reflected in the title of the thesis. This study sees the text itself as an avenue to or a facilitator of enablement within as well as beyond the texts. This is primarily a literary project, and therefore it aims to emphasise the uniqueness of representations of disability. Besides the written text and the film, narrative is here understood as potentially existing in other, non-verbal artistic forms such as paintings, beadwork, and photography. The study reveals how the narratives studied here variously create enabling spaces and discourses.
Narrative enablement cannot be pinned down to a single feature in the texts, but is a phenomenon that occurs at both intra- and extra-textual levels. A helpful way of approaching the concept is by paying attention to the various narratives embedded within each single narrative. In this regard, Gérard Genette’s work on the story-within-a-story has proved very
3
The special issues of the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 4.3 (2010) and Wagadu: A
Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies 4 (Summer 2007) are relevant examples of growing
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useful. In Narrative Discourse, he helpfully illustrates how the concept of “narrative” can refer to three different aspects of the story: the story itself, with focus on the content, the form of the story, and thirdly, the act of storytelling as performance (Genette 25-26). This description fits in with my notion of narrative as an enabling act. Firstly, taken as “the narrative statement” (Genette 25), the chosen texts are enabling creations in the very process of highlighting conditions of disability in literature and film. Of course, as Lennard Davis observes, there is hardly a work of literature that does not feature some form of disablement (Enforcing Normalcy 44). In the texts under study, however, disability is not relegated to the margins of the plot, but the examples and experiences of disabled characters, and other people’s responses to them, are featured centrally. Seen for its formal qualities, narrative is also examined as enabling in the way that disabled characters emerge as voiced storytellers rendering their own narratives through unique and chosen forms. Additionally, enablement comes about in the very act of telling the story (by both the characters and the authors), as a form of agency, acquiring a voice and making a claim for recognition. Enablement is achieved in the way these narratives, to borrow Lara’s words, “[enter] into the public sphere and struggl[e] for public recognition” (Moral Textures 3). The notion of recognition is helpful in clarifying the idea of narrative enablement as it is formulated in this thesis. I use the term narrative enablement to indicate that which happens in the interaction between the text and its readership/viewership. This is the arena in which enablement (recognition) occurs; the public sphere where attitudes are formed. Narrative enablement can therefore be detected in the narrative content, in the act of narration (agency), through the formal qualities of creativity, and in the transformative potential of the text (in the public sphere). This concept is delineated more fully in the course of the dissertation and by means of appropriate examples from the texts, which are analysed in detail.
The target of this thesis is therefore, primarily, the reader of fiction and the cinematographic audience. Even though ‘enablement’ as I employ the term initially denotes conditions or moments of agency exercised by disabled characters in the texts or by their authors by means of the texts, it occurs also in the (actual or potential) reader or viewer of these texts who can (by means of encountering the texts) be equipped to discover or learn more about disability on the African continent and, hence, expand their (general) understanding of conditions and contexts of disability. In their portrayal of disabled characters, the texts make claims for recognition in various ways. This is evident, for instance, in the reaffirmation of the disabled character’s masculinity in Musa Zulu’s The Language of Me, as well as in Delia
Jarrett-8
Macauley’s empathetic portrayal of traumatized ex-child soldiers in Moses, Citizen & Me. Such characters strive to assert their humanity in the face of social environments that may want to render them invisible or inaudible. Through their depictions, the authors of these texts have made the important step of enabling the recognition of the disabled person’s presence in society.
The genres of enablement
So far, my reference point has mainly been written literature. However, the discourse of mainstream disability studies remains equally ignorant of non-Western representations of disability across other genres. The examples of African creative texts studied in this thesis are drawn from three genres – the novel, the memoir and film. In spite of this clear identification of genres, the structure of the thesis is not based on distinct genre classification. Instead, my approach is to take the texts primarily as narratives of disability, rather than as belonging to particular genres. This has the merit of enabling an approach focused on the narratives, while also permitting occasional comparison between various elements of the different texts.
This thesis subscribes to the notion that film and literary narratives offer ways of acquiring and modifying knowledge about the world, validating the suggestion that “narratives can be seen as instruments and expressions of learning” (Lara, Moral Textures 103). The texts marshalled in the study are windows into the African continent, and help advance the argument that the continent is not one homogeneous entity, but instead comprises various environments and people. This is related to what Edward Said calls the “worldliness” of the text, which emanates from its being connected to the very world which makes up its subject. As Said points out, “texts have ways of existing that even in their most rarefied form are always enmeshed in circumstance, time, place and society – in short, they are in the world, and hence worldly” (35). This worldliness is informed by various factors, including socio-cultural contexts, political environments that the text is a part of. Focusing on disability further emphasises the fact that these texts draw from particular socio-cultural epistemologies. They therefore depict disability as a phenomenon that is not a fixed identity, but rather as one that exists “as a shifting health state on a continuum of culturally-mandated health and bodily norms” (Ngue 21, my emphasis). The cultural element in the depiction of disability mentioned here helps to indicate how definitions of disability may differ across cultures. In the words of prominent disability studies scholar David Bolt, “[w]hichever models [of disability] we invoke, be they tragic, charitable, religious, individual, medical,
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social or affirmative, cultural factors cannot be ignored” ("Social Encounters" 293). With the examples of the selected texts, this thesis illustrates the importance of these cultural factors in defining and understanding disability.
The memoirs included in the thesis – Spring Will Come, The Language of Me, and
Able-Bodied – bring something unique to the study through their authorship by disabled people or
by people closely related to disabled persons. These memoirs (to apply one scholar’s words):
are about the process of learning to live with an unexpected impairment – often not just of its medical and practical demands on daily life but also of the author’s realization of his or her changed social status and, sometimes, changed perceptions. Such accounts provide insight not only into the everyday material barriers encountered by a disabled person but also into what it takes, practically and subjectively, to ‘do’ disability well. (Scully, "Moral Bodies" 26)
Jackie Leach Scully’s observation tempts one to regard the memoir genre as being more ‘authentic’ than its fictional counterpart. However, the inclusion of these memoirs is not meant to suggest the imposition of a hierarchy. Instead, they are recognized – alongside fiction – as equally worthy contributions to the corpus of imaginative writings that have disability as their subject.
If written African representations of disability are generally under-acknowledged in the ‘world’ of disability studies, the same applies to cinematographic depictions. Scholarship on disability in film has been largely based on Western representations, with most scholars agreeing that bodily difference is frequently employed as a literary device for commenting on other social problems (Kriegel, 1987; Norden 1994; Enns and Smit 2001; Mitchell & Snyder, 2000; Riley 2005). The presentation of disability on the screen serves a number of other functions. For instance, the visual projection of bodily difference provides another manifestation of Quayson’s “aesthetic nervousness” in the sense of the filmmakers’ encoding of disabilities in ways that aim to remove any anxiety that may emanate from the encounter with disability by mostly able-bodied viewers. In some instances, the cinematographic portrayal of the disability allows “an audience to focus on the disability without the awkwardness of staring in public” (Safran 471). This statement emphasizes the point that by creating disabled characters in film, the director essentially offers them for the audience to stare at. In Staring: How We Look (2009), Rosemarie Garland-Thomson discusses the role of the stare as a meaning-making process between the “starer” and the “staree”. The film medium disrupts that exchange. Similarly to the written text, therefore, the audio-visual medium provides a buffer zone of interpersonal contact between the able-bodied and the
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disabled. In the African context, cinema is especially important because it mostly sidesteps the requirement of literacy associated with the written text. It is precisely because of the challenge of prevalent illiteracy that the filmmaker Ousmane Sembène chose to focus on filmmaking over novel writing, realizing that the majority of Africans would find the former medium easier to access (Armes 282; Fofana 58). The representation of disability in film thus has the potential to open up a whole new world to readers and viewers.
In the Hollywood tradition, most depictions of disability are “[t]he safest bets for Oscar gold” (Riley 71), mainly attributed to their appeals to the audience’s pity. In these films, if the disabled character is not presented in stereotypical fashion, he or she is cast in a role that does not affect the flow of the story. A pioneering critic on disability in cinema, Martin F. Norden, observes:
We live in a consumer culture, and we might well argue that disability, like many other imaged subjects, is a commodity. Hollywood filmmakers are trying to “sell” audiences certain images with the assumption that, if the audiences accept it (or at least, don’t protest it too loudly), they will keep buying tickets for more of the same. ("Hollywood Discourse" 24)
Hollywood filmmakers, therefore, usually give the audience the ending they long for, the “recipe of normalcy, injury, recovery” (Riley 25). However, it is not only in the biased depiction of disabled characters that the Hollywood movie industry fails. The misrepresentation of disabled people is further complicated by the politics of the film production process itself, where able-bodied characters have for a long time played the roles of disabled people (Norden, Cinema 22). Fortunately, this is now changing in most films, as casting disabled actors to play such roles is recognised as an empowering move.
This thesis, however, is not concerned with Hollywood films, but with African cinematic productions whose narratives are significantly concerned with disability. In the chapters to follow, the study argues that the films are also examples of narrative enablement in their representations of disablement. Historically, most African films have restricted budgets, relying on government assistance or seeking financing from private organisations (Pfaff, "Introduction" 6; McCall 93). Given the numerous African films in existence, tackling a variety of concerns, scholarly work on African film is vast, with most researchers noting the postcolonial reclaiming of African history undertaken by various film directors (e.g. Diawara 1992; Barlet 2000). The reclaiming of African history, for example, is one of several thematic trends in African filmmaking noted by African film scholar Manthia Diawara. Other trends
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include “social realist narratives [that] draw on contemporary experiences, and […] oppose tradition to modernity, oral to written, agrarian and customary communities to urban and industrialized systems, and subsistence economies to highly productive economies” (Diawara 141) as well as “films of historical confrontation that put into conflict Africans and their European colonizers” (Diawara 152). These films reclaim representation of the African from the position of the Other, serving not only a historical function, but asserting the humanity of its subjects. The more recent content of African filmmaking is focused on depicting varied contemporary socio-economic realities of Africa, evoking post-colonial, local realities.
Disability is one of these contemporary realities in and of Africa, and indeed the rest of the world. In the films, disabled characters feature in both leading and supporting roles. Such characters range from the mentally scarred Pays in Sembène’s Camp de Thiaroye (1989), the physically disabled Sili Laam in Djibril Diop Mambéty’s La petite vendeuse de soleil (1999), to more contemporary figures like the deaf Simangaliso in Ramadan Suleman’s Zulu Love
Letter (2004). There are also a number of documentary films highlighting the experiences of
people with different disabilities on the continent (Devlieger 1998; Nepveux and Beitiks 2010). It is commendable that some scholars within disability studies have initiated the study of representations of disability within African films. Patrick Devlieger and Jori de Coster, for instance, have carried out a semiotic analysis of disability representations, with a focus on “developing an aesthetic appreciation and a content analysis of the way ‘the disabled body’ is portrayed in African films” (Devlieger and de Coster 146). Their work focuses rather emphatically on the aesthetics of filmmaking, at the expense of examining the socio-cultural contexts of the narratives. This is in spite of their acknowledgement of the significance of context in informing definitions of disability within the African context: “In the context of Africa, the contexts of disability are multiple. Cultural systems of thought and practice, the impact of colonialism, and the forces of modernity are all sources of meaning-making” (Devlieger and de Coster 146). This emphasis on context is particularly important for the current study, and provides a basis upon which I examine several themes in the narratives. Equally relevant is Abdou Salam Yaro’s doctoral thesis, in which he devotes considerable time to an examination of the image of the disabled child as represented in African cinema. Regarding disability depictions in African film, he writes:
[E]n recourant au handicap, le cinéma africain se dote d’un autre langage cinématographique qui lui permet d’aborder des sujets pertinents liés à des sociétés post-coloniales: les relations dominant-dominé, que ce soit au sein d‘une société patriarcale, d’un gouvernement ou encore sur le plan économique
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entre nations riches et pauvres, ces relations donc peuvent être revues et analysées dans des films qui évoquent le handicap.
[Thus, using disability, African cinema acquires another cinematic language that enables it to address pertinent issues related to post-colonial societies: dominant-subordinate relationships. Whether within patriarchal societies, government or between economically rich and poor nations, these relationships can then be reviewed and analysed in films that portray disability] (Yaro 39)
This emerging area of study therefore appears to reveal that although African filmmakers do include disabled characters in their productions, they tend to be a means to ends that the filmmakers consider more relevant to Africans. With a focus on the use of disability as metaphor, Yaro identifies a trend that is not entirely new in disability studies. What the field needs – and indeed what this thesis endeavours to do – is an examination that prioritizes the texts as the primary referent, instead of employing them to confirm pre-existing theoretical postulations and models. This is the optimal approach for communicating the contributions of these texts to the rest of the world, in effect resisting their amputation from the global discourse of disability.
African films have historically taken on the role of countering the misrepresentation of the African continent and its people by the West, providing “an insider’s perspective” (Devlieger and de Coster 147) to realities of the continent. In the films examined in this thesis, the characters are depicted not only in symbolic roles, but also as people deserving recognition from the viewer. The focus on various contexts on the African continent enables an appreciation of how these communities understand disability.
Theoretical points of departure
I see my study as being part of growing scholarship that resists merely confirming existing theory in literary disability studies. The dominant scholarship in the field rests on the foundation of Western literature, and predominantly on assessments of the lives of disabled people in the Global North. This thesis attempts to challenge some of the postulations of such scholarship, highlighting their non-universality, but also to suggest possible advances in thinking about disability and its representation. The texts are therefore not merely clad in disability studies raiment, but instead, challenge the assumed universality of some of the existing theory on the topic.
That being said, one cannot ignore the valuable contributions to the study of representations of disability by various scholars. Particularly relevant to some aspects of this thesis are ideas
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from David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, contained in Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and
the Dependencies of Discourse (2000). This book presents the authors’ important argument
that disability is usually figured as “prosthesis” in imaginative works. The central argument in the text pertains to the way in which various representations of disability unfailingly employ disability as “a stock feature of representation” and “as an opportunistic metaphorical device” (47). As a result, artists often shy away from depicting the experiential dimension of disability, making it instead “an explicitly complicating feature of their representational universes” (2). Disability is a phenomenon that is part of – and arguably defined by – an ableist world. Therefore, a discussion of disablement has to incorporate some idea of how the non-disabled public regards disabled persons. In this regard, I have made some use of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s concepts “normate” and “misfit” in my discussion of interactions between disabled characters and the ableist public. The first concept is one she introduces in her book Extraordinary Bodies (1997), another indispensable text in the discipline of disability studies. The normate is the ideal, able-bodied figure that is in opposition to deviance. It “designates the social figure through which people can represent themselves as definite human beings” (Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies 8). The “misfit” is a more recent coinage, denoting the limited opportunities for the accommodation of disabled persons in a materially ableist-oriented world (Garland-Thomson, "Misfits" 594).
The broad interpretive framework of the thesis relies heavily on the work of María Pía Lara, specifically on her model of recognition, presented in Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in
the Public Sphere (1998). Lara’s work has as its primary concern the writing of women, and
how such writings have crossed over from the private into the public domain, through what she terms their “illocutionary force”. Drawing inspiration from Jürgen Habermas, Lara develops the meaning of this notion as the capacity of narratives to reconfigure justice and the good, through a re-imagination of the public sphere. This illocutionary force, writes Lara, “consist[s] of new ways of conceiving political forms which have to be imagined before they
can be achieved” (Lara 77, my emphasis). This is the means by which narratives can
challenge myths. Their illocutionary force imbues these texts with transformative capability, for they carry the potential to script futures that herald novel conceptions of particular sections of society, ways of thinking that indicate a break from past forms. As she points out elsewhere, however, “illocutionary force” is not exclusive to women’s writing, but can also be found in other narratives where the “use of fictional language to describe their own positions points […] to the successful interaction between moral claims and aesthetic
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expressions” (Lara, "Reply" 184). Lara’s insights can be applied to many texts with disability as their subject. Once in the public sphere, such “emancipatory narratives mediate between particular group identities and universalistic moral claims, providing new frameworks that allow those who are not members of the group to expand their own-self conceptions and their definitions of civil society” (Lara, Moral Textures 3). The most important part of these narratives is therefore the transformative potential that they possess regarding their effect on the reader/viewer. This transformative process is at the heart of Lara’s model of recognition, which is important for what I postulate as narrative enablement.
As a primarily literary study, parts of the following examination focus on the formal qualities of representation, in particular assessing how these formal features can function as enabling devices used by the writers and filmmakers. In this regard, I employ Bakhtin’s (1975) notion of “heteroglossia” and Gérard Genette’s (1972) discussion of narrative levels respectively in the earlier and later sections of the study. Bakhtin makes the following observation:
Any concrete discourse (utterance) finds the object at which it was directed already as it were overlain with qualifications, open to dispute, charged with value, already enveloped in an obscuring mist – or, on the contrary, by the ‘light’ of alien words that have already been spoken about it. It is entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judgements and accents. (276)
The relevance of his thought to the present study derives from the fact that representations of disabled subjects are always infused with particular ideologies and carry the baggage of existing traditions or habits of depiction and response. Bakhtin’s thought can be used to complement Genette’s articulation of diegetic (or narrative) levels in Narrative Discourse, where he explores the relationships among embedded narratives. The notion of diegetic levels is a way of conceptualizing the different levels on which narratives may exist in a single narrative. Genette explores the nature of relationships binding these levels. I employ these theoretical ideas in approaching the multiplicity of narratives of disability that occur within the selected texts.
Besides these areas, particular scholarly positions are adopted to a more limited extent in order to better articulate the arguments in specific sections of the thesis. For instance, the discussion of overlaps between disability and masculinity invites an engagement with the concept of hegemonic masculinity. In this regard, the work of R. W. Connell (2001) is employed to enrich the analysis. Similarly, the thesis makes occasional use of insights from scholars in the field of life writing, particularly G. Thomas Couser (1997, 2009), and Sidonie
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Smith and Julia Watson (2010). The contributions of scholars on intersectionality such as Nira Yuval-Davis (2006) and Nirmala Erevelles and Andrea Minear (2010) also prove helpful in clarifying the various intersections between disability and other markers of identity. In the thesis, my interpretation of the violent contexts is in a large part informed by Fanon’s writing on this topic. This contributes to an understanding of the intersection between race and violence in particular contexts. Lastly, in the discussions of African film, I am indebted to the work of various scholars in the discipline, including Manthia Diawara (1992) and Françoise Pfaff (1984, 2004), among other critical voices which allow me to articulate my own position.
Defining disability in the African context
Attempts to define the term ‘disability’ have generated much debate. It is a term on which even scholars specializing in the field of disability studies do not agree. Part of the complexity of the task comes from the fact that, in the social model, ‘disability’ is deemed a condition different from ‘impairment’. This distinction stems from disciplinary focus on either the individual’s anatomy or their placement in society. The term ‘impairment’ draws attention to bodily difference, seen as “lacking part of or all of a limb, or having a defective limb, organ or mechanism of the body” (Oliver 22), whereas disability is seen as “the disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by a contemporary social organisation which takes no or little account of people who have physical impairments and thus excludes them from participation in the mainstream of social activities” (Oliver 22). Most modern definitions of disability are variants of the one Michael Oliver provides, emphasising the social aspects of disablement over the bodily impairment. One of the advantages of the social model is that this mode of thinking “mandates barrier removal, anti-discrimination legislation, independent living and other responses to social oppression” (Shakespeare, "Social Model" 216). Although it has its flaws, it remains the ideal model for conceptualising the interaction of disabled people with other people in their societies, which is an important aspect of this study.
However, most of the vocabulary of disability studies scholarship is formed on the basis of an archive of experiences of disability in the developed world. Where studies of disability in the Global South do emerge, they are often characterised by fitting into “a discernible pattern of homogenisation, simplification and generalisation achieved through the alignment of the assumed disability experience in the majority world [developing countries] with that
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proposed by Western disability studies” (Grech, "Recolonising Debates" 89). Recent research indicates that conceptions of disability in developing countries may be significantly different from those in the developed world. This has obvious implications for the methods of intervention and rehabilitation that are proposed by aid providers to low income countries. Therefore, even though the field of disability studies is quite well developed in the Global North, care must be taken when exporting its terminologies to other parts of the world. As Ato Quayson observes, “[a]ny attempt to universalize the category ‘disabled’ runs into conceptual problems of the most fundamental sort” (Calibrations 101). In their book,
Disability & Culture, Benedicte Ingstad and Susan Whyte expand on this cautionary point:
The concept of disability itself must not be taken for granted. In many cultures, one cannot be ‘disabled’ for the simple reason that ‘disability’ as a recognized category does not exist. There are blind people and lame people and ‘slow’ people, but ‘the disabled’ as a general term does not translate easily into many languages. (7)
One way out of this apparent quandary is to adopt a position that emphasises “people’s own experiences of what is disabling in their world rather than […] some universal definition” (Ingstad and Whyte, "Disability Connections" 11). Unique in Ingstad and Whyte’s position is the decision not to restrict themselves to “the conventional prototypes of sensory, motor, and intellectual disability” (Ingstad and Whyte, "Disability Connections" 11). Instead, they prioritize the contexts of research as the main determinants for understanding disablement. This reflects a decision made during the development of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, where delegates agreed that definitions of disability can vary across different countries (Chataika 260). Far from resulting in chaos, this decision permits countries to develop models of intervention and care based on their contexts.
Particularly important is the need to acknowledge various factors, unique to Africa, which are potentially disabling to most people. Such disabling factors include war and poverty, as well as disease. In the poorest of nations on the continent, “[d]isabled people […] confront barriers to the most basic of human needs (food, health, education, assistive devices, inadequate hard infrastructure and sanitation, remoteness, etc), issues all too irrelevant to the western disability debate” (Grech, "Critical Reflections" 777). To make matters worse, the experience of colonialism means that on the continent, addressing the concerns of disabled persons has never been as pressing a concern as have been other factors such as colonialism, neo-colonialism, racial discrimination, ethnic differences, or development. Tom Shakespeare notes, for instance, that among the eight United Nations Millennium Development Goals
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(MDGs), disability does not explicitly stand out, even though it is referenced in background documents ("Social Encounters" 279). This is in spite of the fact that the MDGs are mostly targeted towards the world’s poorest nations. This illustrates that in the hierarchy of concerns of developing nations, disability does not rank very high.
Given that numerous instances of disability on the African continent (and represented in the texts examined here) are connected to violence, this study pays close attention to kinds of trauma sometimes associated with disability. This is a move which eventually allows for the examination of a sense of loss sometimes associated with disablement. In this turn, I concur that the discipline of disability studies severally evinces
a rigidity and defensiveness in the […] stance taken by [disability theorists], as if an acknowledgment of damage, or of a need to mourn the loss of an ability that was previously enjoyed, or of lasting, symptomatic effects in excess of some neutral concept of physical difference might discredit the entire discipline and even endanger the subjectivities of its practitioners. (Berger 573)
Beyond the usual emphasis on the social construction of disability, therefore, there is some merit in paying attention to “[c]auses of disability that may be traumatic, and consequences of disability that may be symptomatic of earlier trauma” (Berger 573). I find that this particular slant allows (for example) for a richer reading of Simangaliso and post-apartheid South Africa in Zulu Love Letter; the ostracized ex-child soldiers in Moses, Citizen & Me; as well as victims of torture in Beneath the Lion’s Gaze.
With its focus on the African context, this study respects the identification of cultural difference as being a key factor in the understanding of disability. The perception of disability this thesis strives for is one which pays heed to such cultural relativity. It draws from the understanding that “there are issues related to disability that are uniquely African” (Owusu-Ansah and Mji 3) and that can differ according to particular locations, class variations, as well as mytho-religious beliefs, among other factors. This is not a way of essentialising African experience, but rather one of drawing attention to the fact of alternative modes of reading disablement which contribute to broadening and diversifying knowledge of its complexity as a topic and provide access to other (African) forms of it, as ‘understandable’ experience. Such an understanding draws on what Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell propose as a cultural model of disability (Cultural Locations 5), where “[t]he definition of disability must incorporate both the outer and inner reaches of culture and experience as a combination of profoundly social and biological forces” (Cultural Locations 7). The
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suitability of such an approach is clear when we consider, for example, the way cultural practice makes the Abuzeid patriarch believe that his disabled son is not worthy of marriage to any woman in Lyrics Alley, or the way impotence acquires multiply disabling meanings in
Xala, or even the way Simangaliso’s deafness is regarded as a disability by some people and
not by others in Zulu Love Letter. When the term ‘disability’ is used in this thesis, therefore, it is to refer, as Nicole Quackenbush puts it, to a condition that is “a product of society’s unwillingness to accept or accommodate bodily/mental difference” (9). As a working definition, this has the merit of capturing the centrality of social context in the construction of disablement. However, I acknowledge that the definition has its shortfalls, for example failing to highlight cultural specificity. To compensate for this the present study is primarily an exercise in the exemplification, rather than an attempt at reaching a comprehensive
definition, of disability within the African context as represented in the chosen texts. Context
becomes particularly important in this regard, as one of the key endeavours of the study is to highlight the role of traditional beliefs (where they are evident) in the understanding of disablement – how they contribute to the social exclusion or inclusion of disabled characters. The present venture should be read as challenging the “glaring dearth of disability-related scholarship by and about disabled people of color” (Bell 278). It is a way of rejecting amputation of African perspectives from the global discourse of disability. The intersectional approach adopted here usefully permits a study of depictions of disability in its entanglement with multiple zones of identity (including marginalized ones), as well as various epistemological frames. The thesis is therefore an attempt to highlight new regions into which disability studies could advance.
Description of chapters
The thesis is divided into four chapters, arranged according to particular focal emphases. This entails that some of the texts are examined more than once, and such an approach permits multiple readings of disablement in the same texts, but also highlights various forms of disablement and enablement.
My first analytical chapter is a discussion of the experiential, focusing on the lived experience of the male disabled character in five texts: South African memoirs Spring Will
Come, The Language of Me, and Able-Bodied; Sudanese author Leila Aboulela’s novel, Lyrics Alley and Nigerian Caine Prize winner Helon Habila’s novel, Measuring Time. Placing
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and masculinity, with emphasis on the affected characters’ feelings concerning their ‘different’ bodies. Furthermore, in this chapter, I examine modes of agency through which the featured characters counter the ideology of ability through the articulation of specific aspects of their masculinity.
In both colonial and postcolonial Africa, violence is often linked to disablement. In the second chapter, I explore the role of various historical nodes of violence in causing and perpetuating disability on the continent, as depicted in Sembène’s filmic take on the Thiaroye massacre of African soldiers in Camp de Thiaroye; Miles’s ‘police novel’ Deafening Silence; Mengiste’s Beneath the Lion’s Gaze and Jarrett-Macauley’s blend of magical realism and historical fiction in Moses, Citizen & Me. Focusing on the experiences of these characters, I analyse the manner in which these historical contexts of violence act as disabling and disenabling factors to people on the continent. Yet the texts ultimately illustrate the resilience of the characters’ human will to live meaningfully despite all this violence and its consequences.
In chapter three I argue that the selected narratives destabilize certain prevalent constructions of disability by means of their depictions of what I term the dis/ability zone, as an area characterised by the interaction of the disabled characters with the ableist world and ideology. By highlighting the unstable and porous nature of this zone, the chapter indicates how the label of disability can be rendered fluid in African communities. I draw here on the representation of disablement in the celebrated satiric film (and novel) Xala; the award winning South African film Zulu Love Letter and Jarrett-Macauley’s post-civil war novel
Moses, Citizen & Me.4
My central focus in the fourth chapter regards the art forms contained within some of these narratives, which I examine in order to highlight the individual and social functions that these art works serve for the concerned characters. Making reference to creativity displayed in
Spring Will Come; The Language of Me; Lyrics Alley; Zulu Love Letter; Moses, Citizen & Me
and Measuring Time, I illustrate how, through these texts, the subaltern does not only speak, but is able to articulate himself or herself in forms that sometimes challenge ableist assumptions.
4
Zulu Love Letter is the recipient of several awards, including the Prix Spécial Union Européenne at FESPACO (2005), the Grand Prize at the 21st Mons International Love Film Festival (2005), as well as the Cape Town World Cinema Award (2005).
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The final section of the study is a reflection on how the various chapters contribute to the discussion and development of the notion of narrative enablement. In the conclusion, I explore various concepts that have emerged in the course of the study. This concluding move is therefore a suggestion of the possibilities of narrative enablement occurring beyond the sphere of the characters in the texts.
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Chapter 1: Narrating the Experiential: Living With/in Disability
Mwamuna ali ngati kabudula, amathera moyenda
[a man is just like a pair of shorts, they both wear out through movement] (Chewa proverb)
Introduction
There is a Chewa proverb that most children in Malawi are taught. This proverb – mako ndi
mako usamuone kuchepa mwendo – literally translates as “your mother is still your mother
even if she has a deformed leg” (Chimedza and Peters 424). The moral here is that we must unconditionally love our parents for bringing us into this world and for their care during our childhood. What is more interesting in the proverb, however, is the choice of image. The proverb cautions that one should not love one’s mother less if she has a disability. Attention is drawn to bodily difference as a potential cause of diminished affection towards another. In other words, the proverb appears to acknowledge (and dispute) the supposition that those with ‘abnormal’ bodies do not merit as much affection as the able-bodied, even if they are our direct relations.
Although the proverb is from a particular culture, its moral is drawn from experiences that are common in the contexts of the narratives under study in this chapter. All the texts are set in African countries – South Africa, Egypt, Sudan and Nigeria. In spite of the difference in geographical and temporal location, the texts feature characters with disabilities who invite analysis in terms of the uniqueness and similarity of their experiences. All the texts handled in this chapter have male protagonists, a feature which, as mentioned earlier, reflects the shortage of available and suitable texts. Furthermore, the auto/biographies included here are all by male South African authors (from different class and racial positions), signalling the comparative dearth of life writing on the continent that centres disability. In spite of the gender limitation, however, the focus on issues of masculine [self-]identification permits an exploration of enlightening comparisons among the texts.
In focus within the chapter is the literary representation of these experiences as they are felt by key characters in the narratives, with the aim of providing insight into what it is like to live with a disability. Due to the aforementioned similarity in the gender of the protagonists, an important concern for this chapter is the texts’ depictions of the interface between disablement and notions of masculinity, within contexts governed by particular scripts of
